What 'terrorized' federal employees say about the decision to stay or go under Trump
06 February
Donald Trump attends the America First Policy Institute gala at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 14, 2024.
In the face of the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to reshape the Environmental Protection Agency and drive out its workers, more than 300 career employees have left their jobs since the election, according to a ProPublica analysis of personnel data.
The numbers account for a relatively small share of the overall workforce at the EPA, but those who have departed include specialist civil servants crucial to its mission: toxicologists, lawyers, engineers, biologists, toxic waste specialists, emergency workers, and water and air quality experts.
Gary Jonesi made the decision to leave on election night. An attorney who helped enforce environmental laws for almost 40 years, he had loved working for the agency under both Democratic and Republican presidents. But he feared what the incoming administration might do.
In the past weeks, as the Trump administration has signaled radical changes at the agency and attempted to entice workers into leaving, he feels he made the right choice. “I didn’t know it was going to be this bad,” said Jonesi, who worked on litigation related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico as well as cases that involved both water and air pollution. “I feel for my old colleagues. And I feel for the American public, who are being put in danger.”
Other career employees expressed a mixture of fear, resignation and quiet defiance as they faced a painful decision: quit or work for an administration that has openly proclaimed its intention to radically transform the agency in addition to rolling back environmental protections.
In his first weeks in office, President Donald Trump announced plans to reverse efforts to address climate change, abandon the EPA’s decadeslong focus on protecting the most vulnerable communities from pollution and step away from other key initiatives at the heart of the agency’s work.
At the same time, Trump has embarked on an unprecedented government-wide campaign to drive workers from their jobs. Employees throughout the federal government received offers to resign but get paid through September — a move experts say is legally questionable and unions have challenged in court. Some recently hired workers who are still on probation have been told their agencies have the right to immediately let them go.
EPA workers face additional threats. Trump’s team has discussed relocating the agency’s headquarters outside of Washington, D.C., a move that would likely force many of the roughly 7,000 employees who work there to quit. And he issued an executive order on “radical and wasteful government DEI programs,” which included a directive to terminate, “to the maximum extent allowed by law,” all environmental justice offices and positions. The order could result in the firing of hundreds of staff members who work on pollution in disproportionately burdened areas, which often have lower incomes, higher percentages of residents of color or both.
At a sometimes tearful meeting held at EPA headquarters and online on Wednesday, leaders of the agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights told staff members that the EPA was beginning to implement that directive. “We’re all preparing for the worst,” said one environmental protection specialist who attended the meeting, where workers were instructed to prepare for the possibility of being placed on administrative leave and download their human resources files. “We’re preparing to be laid off.”
Employees in other parts of the agency are similarly distraught.
“We feel terrorized,” said one of the more than 20 current EPA employees who communicated with ProPublica about their experience of working at the agency under the second Trump administration. None said they planned to take up the offer to resign, a proposal that the agency said in numerous emails is open to staff until Thursday.
While there is an obvious appeal of quitting a job when your employer is aggressively trying to oust you, the EPA staffer, whose work involves measuring pollution levels in air, water and soil at contaminated sites, said he felt a moral obligation to stay.
“If I leave, my experience would go with me and there would be no replacement,” he said. (Along with the other EPA employees quoted in this story, the scientist spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retribution by the Trump administration.)
Others found the financial enticements to leave insulting. “I don’t work here for the fucking money,” said one longtime agency employee who works on air pollution. “I work here because I believe in it, and I want to serve the public.”
An emergency worker who responds to chemical fires, oil spills and national disasters echoed that sentiment, saying he has no intention of walking away from the work he’s done for more than 20 years, which he described as “the most challenging and amazing job there is.”
Other EPA employees are already bracing themselves for the possible end of their stints at the agency. One young scientist was winding down a day spent reviewing reports on drinking water last week when she received the email informing her that she had been identified as likely being on a probationary period and laying out the process for terminating her.
Until that point, she had been thinking of her first months in what she described as a “dream job” at the EPA as the beginning of a long career in civil service. “All that came crashing down when I got that email,” said the scientist, who recently finished graduate school and is now steeling herself for the likelihood that she will have to move back in with her parents.
If she goes, the scientist will join the more than 300 career staffers who have left since the election. That group is part of a brain drain of more than 500 EPA workers ProPublica identified as having departed since Nov. 22; the full group includes political appointees and short-term staff. Changes in administrations typically trigger turnovers at federal agencies, but ProPublica found the number leaving the EPA appears to have already eclipsed by more than 60 the number that left after President Joe Biden was elected in 2020. It is unclear exactly what motivated staffers to leave in recent weeks and how many more might be forced out or quit on their own terms in the coming days.
The shakeup is unprecedented, according to some veteran employees. “When you take a job at a federal agency, you know there are elections every four years. You know there are going to be changes in administration priorities,” said a scientist who has weathered many of these transitions during her more than 20 years working in the federal government. “This is something else.”
The EPA did not respond to questions for this story, including how many employees had taken the agency up on its offers to resign.
Taking the Side of Polluters
The EPA’s mission to protect human health and the environment requires it to do the often difficult work of regulating powerful companies. Under any administration, the agency faces intense lobbying from these entities as they seek to avoid expense and the burdens of compliance. Corporate pressure on the EPA was considerable under Biden as his administration attempted to tackle climate pollution.
But Trump appears eager to both scale back the agency, which has more than 15,000 employees, and align what remains of it with the companies it regulates. During the campaign, he asked oil executives for $1 billion while promising to cut environmental regulations, according to The Washington Post.
On Friday, two days after the Senate confirmed Lee Zeldin as EPA administrator, the agency put out a press release supporting Zeldin’s ability to “Unleash American Greatness.” Among those quoted were representatives of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Mining Association, the American Petroleum Institute and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, all of which have recently challenged the agency in court.
In a brief welcome address, Zeldin discussed making the nation “energy dominant” and “turning the U.S. into the AI capital of the world.” (AI is widely recognized as a climate threat because it consumes vast amounts of energy.) Other Trump appointees have worked for fossil fuel and chemical companies and have previously opposed stricter environmental regulation. David Fotouhi, whom Trump nominated to be second-in-command of the agency, recently tried to overturn its ban on asbestos.
The administration is planning to remove civil service protections from certain federal workers, which would allow some positions now held by highly skilled personnel to be reclassified so they could be filled based on loyalty to the administration rather than expertise. The move could have tremendous implications for the EPA, whose workforce includes thousands of highly trained experts.
“If he replaces EPA scientists and lawyers with people who just want to say yes to him, it will be the death knell for the EPA,” said Kyla Bennett, director of science policy at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
The Human Costs
The redirection of the agency and the loss of experienced professionals who respond to emergencies, monitor pollution, clean up highly contaminated areas and enforce environmental laws will have profound effects across the country.
“Nastier stuff than usual will come out of factories. More people will get cancer. More people will get heart disease. People will die sooner and they’ll be sicker,” said one Ph.D. scientist who works at the agency.
Because he spends part of his time focusing on health in particularly polluted areas, the scientist may find himself in the crosshairs of Trump’s order to eliminate all environmental justice work and positions. The order could directly affect as many as 250 EPA employees, according to Matthew Tejada, who served as the EPA deputy assistant administrator for environmental justice during the Biden administration.
The environmental justice office was established in 1992, after research donein the 1980s showed that communities with hazardous waste sites had higher percentages of Black and low-income residents. Two years later, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order requiring all federal agencies to make environmental justice part of their mission. As of publication, a page about the 1994 executive order had been removed from the EPA website. The agency also disabled EJScreen, an online mapping tool that was used to identify pollution levels in communities around the country, along with other information about environmental justice and climate change.
The Ph.D. scientist described the mood within his office as “a combination of exhaustion and exasperation with what’s very clearly a calculated campaign of harassment.” Still, he is hoping he will escape the apparently imminent purge of EPA staff working on environmental justice.
For some staff, the rapid changes are a bridge too far. One chemist who has worked at the agency for more than a decade described himself as seriously thinking about leaving — though on his terms, not in response to the administration’s resignation offer. “My motivation to work at EPA was because I want to protect human health and the environment and the lure of a stable job,” he told ProPublica. “But now all that’s gone.”
Others say the administration’s aggressive efforts to drive them out of the EPA have left them only more determined to stay. “Personally, it makes me want to hang on until I have the chance to do (or not do) something worth getting fired for,” one lawyer said.
Another scientist, who oversees the cleanup of highly contaminated sites, agreed. He saw the departures from EPA norms and repeated offers to resign as designed to scare him and others out of the agency — and vowed that the tactics would not work on him.
“It won’t make me quit,” the scientist said. “Nothing is going to make me quit.”
Instead, the scientist recently bought a new Black history month T-shirt that he plans to wear when he is required to return to the office full time in late February. “I’m going to dare somebody to say something to me,” he said. He acknowledged that the move, which would broadcast his derision for the Trump administration’s retreat from environmental justice, could get him fired. But he said he didn’t care.
“I’m going to stand up to them,” the scientist said. “I may lose the battle, but principally I will have won the war.”
Do you have any information about the EPA that we should know? Sharon Lerner can be reached by Signal at 718-877-5236.
If you have other information you can share about the federal government, you can reach ProPublica’s tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201.
Kirsten Berg, Mollie Simon and Mariam Elba contributed research. Agnel Philip contributed data analysis.